the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
■
testament
in the beginning
was the word.
the year of our lord,
amen. i
lucille clifton
hereby testify
that in that room
there was a light
and in that light
there was a voice
and in that voice
there was a sigh
and in that sigh
there was a world.
a world a sigh a voice a light and
i
alone
in a room.
■
mother, i am mad.
we should have guessed
a twelve-fingered flower
might break. my knowing
flutters to the ground.
mother i have managed to unlearn
my lessons. i am left
in otherness. mother
someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside.
i am flooded with brilliance
mother,
someone of it is answering to
your name.
■
to joan
joan
did you never hear
in the soft rushes of france
merely the whisper of french grass
rubbing against leathern
sounding now like a windsong
now like a man?
did you never wonder
oh fantastical joan,
did you never cry in the sun’s face
unreal unreal? did you never run
villageward
hands pushed out toward your apron?
and just as you knew that your mystery
was broken for all time
did they not fall then
soft as always
into your ear
calling themselves michael
among beloved others?
and you
sister sister
did you not then sigh
my voices my voices of course?
■
in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.
■
there
there in the homelands
they are arresting children.
they are beating children
and shooting children.
in jo’burg
a woman sits on her veranda.
watching her child.
her child is playing on their lawn.
her man comes home from
arresting children. she smiles.
she offers him a drink.
each morning i practice for
getting that woman.
when her sister calls me sister
i remind myself
she is there.
■
this belief
in the magic of whiteness,
that it is the smooth
pebble in your hand,
that it is the godmother’s
best gift,
that it explains,
allows,
assures,
entitles,
that it can sprout singular blossoms
like jack’s bean
and singular verandas from which
to watch them rise,
it is a spell
winding round on itself,
grimms’ awful fable,
and it turns into capetown and johannesburg
as surely as the beanstalk leads
to the giant’s actual country
where jack lies broken at the
meadow’s edge
and the land is in ruins,
no magic, no anything.
■
why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
■
sorrow song
for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.
■
them bones
them bones will
rise again
them bones
them bones will
walk again
them bones
them bones will
talk again
now hear
the word of The Lord
—Traditional
atlantic is a sea of bones,
my bones,
my elegant afrikans
connecting whydah and new york,
a bridge of ivory.
seabed they call it.
in its arms my early mothers sleep.
some women leapt with babies in their arms.
some women wept and threw the babies in.
maternal armies pace the atlantic floor.
i call my name into the roar of surf
and something awful answers.
■
cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what I am capable of.
when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country
and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.
it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.
i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.
now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.
■
the lost women
i need to know their names
those women I would have walked with
jauntily the way men go in groups
swinging their arms, and the ones
those sweating women whom I would have joined
after a hard game to chew the fat
what would we have called each other laughing
joking into our beer? where are my gangs,
my teams, my mislaid sisters?
all the women who could have known me,
where in the world are their names?
■
my dream about the cows
and then i see the cattle of my own town,
rustled already,
prodded by pale cowboys with a foreign smell
into dark pens built to hold them forever,
and then i see a few of them
rib thin and weeping low over
sparse fields and milkless lives but
standing somehow standing,
and then i see how all despair is
thin and weak and personal and
then i see it’s only
the dream about the cows.
■
my dream about the second coming
mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.
when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.
■
the death of thelma sayles
2/13/59
age 44
i leave no tracks so my live loves
can’t follow. at the river
most turn back, their souls shivering,
but my little girl stands alone on the bank
and watches. i pull my heart out of my pocket
and throw it. i smile as she catches all
she’ll ever catch and heads for home
and her children. mothering
has made it strong, i whisper in her ear
along the leaves.
■
the message of thelma sayles
baby, my only husband turned away.
for twenty years my door was open.
nobody ever came.
the first fit broke my bed.
i woke from ecstasy to ask
what blood is this? am i the bride of Christ?
my bitten tongue was swollen for three days.
i thrashed and rolled from fit to death.
you are my only daughter.
when you lie awake in the evenings
counting your birthdays
turn the blood that clots your tongue
into poems. poems.
■
the death of joanne c.
11/30/82
aged 21
i am the battleground that
shrieks like a girl.
to myself i call myself
gettysburg. laughing,
twisting the i.v.,
laughing or crying, i can’t tell
which anymore,
i host the furious battling of
a suicidal body and
a murderous cure.
■
enter my mother
wearing a peaked hat.
her cape billows,
her broom sweeps the nurses away,
she is flying, the witch of the ward, my mother
pulls me up by the scruff of the spine
incanting Live Live Live!
■
leukemia as white rabbit
running always running murmuring
she will be furious she will be
furious, following a great
cabbage of a watch that tells only
terminal time, down deep into a
rabbit hole of diagnosticians shouting
off with her hair off with her skin and
i am i am i am furious.
■
chemotherapy
my hair is pain.
my mouth is a cave of cries.
my room is filled with white coats
shaped like God.
they are moving their fingers along
their stethoscopes.
they are testing their chemical faith.
chemicals chemicals oh mother mary
where is your living child?
■
the message of jo
my body is a war
nobody is winning.
my birthdays are tired.
my blood is a white flag,
waving.
surrender,
my darling mother,
death is life.
■
the death of fred clifton
11/10/84
age 49
i seemed to be drawn
to the center of myself
leaving the edges of me
in the hands of my wife
and i saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that i had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.
■
“i’m going back to my true identity”
fjc 11/84
i was ready to return
to my rightful name.
i saw it hovering near
in blazoned script
and, passing through fire,
i claimed it. here
is a box of stars
for my living wife.
tell her to scatter them
pronouncing no name.
tell her there is no deathless name
a body can pronounce.
■
in white america
1 i come to read them poems
i come to read them poems,
a fancy trick i do
like juggling with balls of light.
stand, a dark spinner,
in the grange hall,
in the library, in the
smaller conference room,
and toss and catch as if by magic,
my eyes bright, my mouth smiling,
my singed hands burning.
2 the history
1800’s in this town
fourteen longhouses were destroyed
by not these people here.
not these people
burned the crops and chopped down
all the peach trees.
not these people. these people
preserve peaches, even now.
3 the tour
“this was a female school.
my mother’s mother graduated
second in her class.
they were taught embroidery,
and chenille and filigree,
ladies’ learning. yes,
we have a liberal history here.”
smiling she pats my darky hand.
4 the hall
in this hall
dark women
scrubbed the aisles
between the pews
on their knees.
they could not rise
to worship.
in this hall
dark women
my sisters and mothers
though i speak with the tongues
of men and of angels and
have not charity …
in this hall
dark women,
my sisters and mothers,
i stand
and let the church say
let the church say
let the church say
AMEN.
5 the reading
i look into none of my faces
and do the best i can.
the human hair between us
stretches but does not break.
i slide myself along it and
love them, love them all.
6 it is late
it is late
in white america.
i stand
in the light of the
7-11
looking out toward
the church
and for a moment only
i feel the reverberation
of myself
in white america
a black cat
in the belfry
hanging
and
ringing.
■
shapeshifter poem
s
1
the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them
2
who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl
3
if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up
4
the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world
■
i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
■
note to myself
it’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand
(t-shirt)
How to Carry Water Page 5
